Green Day called this one a punk rock opera, and the label stuck because they earned it. Their seventh album follows Jesus of Suburbia, a lower-middle-class American teenager cast as an anti-hero, through a story that runs across the whole record rather than stopping at the end of each track.

Rob Cavallo produced it with the band, working at Studio 880 in Oakland and Ocean Way Recording in Hollywood between 2003 and 2004. Reprise released it on September 21, 2004. For a group six albums into their career, the shift is the point: the writing carries a narrative, the arrangements stretch to hold it, and the sneer gets aimed at something larger than a bad week.

That something is the mood of the early 2000s. The album speaks for a generation that came of age through tumultuous years, 9/11 and the Iraq War among them, and it puts their disillusionment and dissent into the mouth of one suburban teenager. Punk fans who want ambition without losing the volume tend to land here first.